The Garrison Mound stood on the north side of the Hold, where the ground rose in a long green shoulder above the Lowgate lane. The grass there was never cut, because the garrison’s dead were not cut for, and the stones that stuck up through the turf were grey and weathered and leaned in the wind as though they were listening to something further off. Lune had walked round the Mound on her first morning in the Survey seat, and she had counted nineteen stones. She had counted them again on the second morning and got twenty. She had decided not to be troubled by this, because a surveyor is not troubled by a difference of one. She was troubled by the reason for it, which she did not yet know.
She went up the slope at dusk with the rod on her shoulder and the rod-book under her arm. Mourner was already there. She always was, at dusk, as a lamp is always lit in a window that somebody expects to be looked at from the road.
Mourner did not turn round. She was sitting on the bottom step of the stone stair that led up to the chapel-ground, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes half closed, and she looked very much like an old woman who had come to sit with her husband and had been surprised by the wind. Her voice, when it came, was low and clear and carried without effort, as…
